Modern Architecture

You might have seen a couple of people recently point out, as has been pointed out in casual conversations for many years, that modern architecture does not produce nice buildings or nice places. Yes there are buts and exceptions and so on: John Pawson, someone to whom I feel I have linked before, but it seems not, is excellent and of course the last 120 years has produced all kinds of excellence. But you get the picture: we are the richest and most numerous and most scientifically advanced and best educated and all the rest of it people who have ever lived, and yet our buildings are, in the main, something that would embarrass an ill-fed Englishman in 1800 who had visited Italy once, never had a CAD package and had no access to reinforced concrete.

I am not going to go into why this might be. What I find more interesting is the fact that there is so much consensus among the public at large as to what modern architecture should look like.

I read somewhere that theme parks are the only places nowadays where buildings are made to make people happy. But I think there's another possibility: the buildings we see in films portraying idyllic futures. 

Here are a few examples:

- from the film "Passengers"

- from the Star Wars prequels (one of the nice places)

- from the film "Free Guy" (incidentally, well worth a watch)

- from the film ... oh no, hang on, that's actually Singapore Changi Airport in real life.

If you have seen these films (or been to the airport) then you will have an even better idea of what I am talking about, but I think you get the impression from these pictures. ("Tomorrowland" shows something similar too.) What do we consistently see? Lots of buildings - a densely populated area - but the area is walkable and the buildings are on a human scale. Lush greenery: plants draped over the outside of buildings or growing in the streets. Waterfalls (spot them in all but one of the photos above). Pale façades, with the colours similar to those of Bath or Oxford, with the other noticeable colour being green of various shades. It's a strikingly consistent aesthetic vision. It'll be quite nice when it happens - if it happens.